interview

We're thrilled to have the multi-genre author judge our Short Forms Contest this year and took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her award-winning novels, using magic to explore the construct of gender, and the genre-blurring qualities in her work. DEADLINE EXTENDED TO NOVEMBER 15, 2018!

Room’s Annual Fiction Contest is now open until March! First place winner will receive $1,000 and be published in an upcoming issue of Room. This year, short stories will be judged by Catherine Hernandez. Catherine Hernandez is the artistic director of b current performing arts and the award-winning author of Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017). Room's Tamara Jong asks her a few questions about her work, her advice for emerging writers, and what she looks for when judging a contest.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, educator, and the judge for Room’s Annual Cover Art Contest (which closes January 15, 2019). To learn more about Ware's diversity of works, we invited Toronto-based artist Ojo Agi to chat with Ware about the different hats he wears, his contribution as a Toronto documentarist, and how makes his work accessible to communities that don’t always have access to mainstream institutions.

Jessica Johns spoke with Arielle Spence, a queer, nonbinary aspiring writer and arts administrator originally from Coldstream, BC (unceded Okanagan Territory). They were the festival director of Growing Room 2017, Room’s inaugural feminist literary festival, one of the assistant editors of the forthcoming queer issue, and are currently editing Room's Magic issue. Here’s a sneak peak of the RoomMate interview.

To celebrate the launch of Room 41.2 Changing Language, we would like to share the portion of the BackRoom and RoomMate interviews that didn't make it to print. First up, it's Nav Nagra's interview with Dainty Smith, whose work we discovered on Instagram last year.

Vivek Shraya is an artist. Fluent in many mediums including music and the written word, Shraya is also the author of even this page is white, She of the Mountains and her upcoming book I’m Afraid of Men. Shraya released her album Part-Time Woman in 2017 and is one half of the music duo Too Attached, who blew the roof off Room Magazine’s Growing Room 2018 Festival Launch Party earlier this year. I had the pleasure of meeting the powerhouse that is Vivek Shraya at that launch party and jumped at the chance to speak with her again.

The Offing is an online literary magazine that publishes "work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions" and seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in literary spaces. Their new editor-in-Chief, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, is one of fewer than 100 Black American women to ever earn a Ph.D. in Physics. She is an expert in theoretical cosmology and is also internationally recognized for her anti-racist, feminist, and pro-queer writing and activism.